How Unfollowers Can Benefit You

It can’t be helped, if somebody unfollows you on social media it’s easy to feel offended. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a social media manager is to ignore the people who stop following you. As with any organisation, those who leave generally do so for good reason.

Below we have outlined 4 of the main reasons people might unfollow you, and what you can do about it.

1. You post too often/not enough

In many cases, followers may find your content interesting but if you post too often then you may just end up annoying them. Similarly, if you post too little, your audience may forget about you and unfollow you when you suddenly do post something.

To find out what works best for your audience, you may need to do some tests. Try toning down the amount of posts you’re doing, and then crank up the ante to find out which works best for you.

2. Your content is irrelevant to them

Your social media profile says a lot about who you are and what you’re going to be posting about. This is one of the main reasons somebody might follow you.

If you’re a garden centre and you start posting about what you ate for dinner, your followers will see this as irrelevant and might instantly unfollow you for it.

Make sure your content is consistent and your followers will thank you for it.

3. You promote yourself too much

You want your social media profiles to promote you; of course you do otherwise you wouldn’t have them. However, many people will probably follow you for other reasons. These could be:

You post things that benefit them

You’re entertaining

You post competitions/freebies etc

Make sure your social presence has a balance. Social media gives your company the opportunity to show it’s personal side for free, so make the most of it.

4. You seem automated

There’s nothing worse than seeing a stock response to a comment, a constantly repeated tweet, or a post with no personality.

Social media is social for a reason. Tailor your negative feedback response to each person and they will thank you for it. Get talking to your customers and they will reward you with increased reach.

These are just a few reasons your followers may unfollow you. Other reasons may range from:

Bad grammar

Retweeting irrelevant things/too many things

Too negative

Use too many hashtags

Of course it’s never easy determining why somebody has unfollowed you without actually asking them. However, by critically looking at the above four points you can grasp what you might be doing wrong.

Our favourite tool for finding out who has unfollowed you is unfollowers.com. Unfollowers tells you who has unfollowed you on Twitter and Instagram and how long ago that was.

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The most important thing to take from this article is to learn from these mistakes and build your social media presence from it. Negative feedback may actually be more valuable than positive.